The mobile payments market is growing and is expected to touch the $670 billion mark by 2015. The forecast has been made by Juniper Research, which values the current mobile transaction at $240 billion.
Mobile payments do retain a great amount of interest both among the users and the service providers.
Explaining the findings, senior analyst, Juniper Research, David Snow, said, “Our analysis shows that emerging segments such as physical goods payments, NFC and money transfers will fuel market growth by a factor of 2.7 times by 2015. Digital goods is the largest segment and, although forecast to more than double, it is not growing as quickly as some of the newer segments.”
The Juniper Research report says that 75 per cent of the mobile payments would come from North America, Western Europe, and East Asian countries. A look at the current mobile payments scene suggests most of the transactions currently come from the purchase of digital goods, which is expected to be 40 per cent of the total market by 2015.
The increase in the mobile payments would be driven largely by the rapid adoption of mobile ticketing, NFC contactless payments, physical goods purchases and money transfers as it is expected the users in both developed and developing countries would start using their mobiles for day to day transactions.
Those markets where credit cards or banks are not used in large volumes but have a large number of cellphones in circulation may turn out to be just the right kind of market for the mobile payments evangelists.
Only some time ago, another research report (of Forrester) said that the mobile payments in the US would become worth $31 billion by 2016. But the Juniper Research forecast is for worldwide mobile payments, whereas Forrester’s report is only for the US. Juniper Research also sees the mobile payments replacing the wallets altogether, whereas Forrester just seems to be taking mostly digital goods purchase into account.
The Juniper Research report further says, “Some 20 countries are expected to launch NFC services in the next 18 months, resulting in transactions approaching $50 billion worldwide by 2014. Meanwhile, the need for financial access in developing countries is such that active mobile money users will double by 2013 and drive transaction values accordingly.”